Titian: Love, Desire and Death

Titian, Diana and Callisto

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the London National Gallery closed its Titian exhibition after only three days. Very few people saw this show, which, I understand comprised just seven paintings:  the series of six “poesie” (the term used by Titian) on subjects from Ovid, painted for Philip II of Spain (plus a later painting, The Death of Actaeon, which seems to belong to the original set).

The show brings together for the first time since the 17th century the astonishing set of works. It’s not clear from the documentary if Titian was ever paid in full for the paintings, or even what Philip thought of them. But it’s pretty clear in art-historical terms that these paintings rank amongst the greatest works of Titian, and more than that, formed the basis of several other artists’ attempts to create a mythological art: neither naturalistic nor simply a narrative, but with one foot in the land of the gods, as it were. All six pictures are derived from stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Titian depicts them in an idealized never-never land.

When the BBC showed a documentary about the show, I jumped at the chance – only to find it a great disappointment.

TV programmes about art are very rarely successful. It is difficult to translate a static art into a medium that requires motion. So in this documentary, the camera is almost always moving over the paintings, rather than just showing them. That technique may be annoying, but it’s not the main fault of the programme. More significantly, the time was frittered away by irrelevant footage that looked as if the Daily Mail had been invited to review the exhibition. A life model states there is always a sexual element to modelling naked. The woman who now owns Titian’s house in Venice talks about how she was once a cover model for Cosmopolitan. The man who owns what was Titian’s studio claims to be something of a Casanova, and shows pictures from his smartphone to prove it. A local author stated there were 11,000 prostitutes working in Venice in the time of Titian. What did all this have to do with these paintings? Only that the paintings have an intense eroticism about them; they are among the most sensuous paintings ever created.

More significant still was the claim that Titian was guilty of “the male gaze” in these works, ignoring the fear and discomfort experienced by the women in some of the stories. But even here, the treatment was misguided. Mary Beard talked about how many editions of Ovid she has in her library. More helpful would have been to read what Ovid says in the sources for these paintings.

So let’s forget the documentary, and concentrate on this central problem. We today feel uncomfortable about some of the subjects in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Diana and Callisto, Callisto is raped by Jupiter who has taken the form of Diana, unknown to Callisto. It’s not her fault, but once raped, Callisto is now guilty, according to Ovid, and is expelled from Diana’s entourage. “Where is the justice in that?” we cry. Why would Titian depict such a scene? Because there is a justification in the literature for a nude scene. Here is Ovid:

Diana exclaimed with pleasure at the sight, and dipped her foot in the water: delighted with this too, she called to her companions: “There is no one here to see us – let us undress, and bathe in the brook.” [Metamorphoses, translated by Mary Innes, 1955]

But Callisto, like Eve, is no longer comfortable naked.

The Arcadian maiden [Callisto] blushed. All the rest took off their garments, while she alone sought excuses to delay.

The moment chosen by Titian is this combination of nudity and shame. Perhaps the simplest justification for Titian to choose this moment is that opportunities for depiction of nudity were rare in the 16th century. There are only a handful of episodes in the Bible that can include nakedness: Susanna and the Elders, David spying on Bathsheba (and none of them reflect well on the (male) participants either). In Diana and Callisto, Titian goes all out to present a sensuous scene of acres of naked females. It’s not at all clear that Callisto is covered in shame in the painting; if the viewer was not told the story in advance, they would not see Callisto's shame as the central point; but it is certainly the case that the other women are revelling in their nakedness. The guilt of the raped female was simply not in question, neither in Ovid’s poem nor Titian’s painting. This is not a picture about guilt, it’s a celebration of the naked female body en masse. Such a depiction was enough to send shock waves through western art for the next 400 years. Only today do we begin to question the whole basis for the painting.